Dryad
by The Inkline
Summary: [Oneshot, AUish] What creates a demon? What on this earth would mold a person into what Momochi Zabuza has become? A fiction centered around his early years, and the teacher who misguided him.


Dryad

This is a semi-sort-of-not-really companion ficlet to Dem Bones. But you don't actually have to read any of DB since this is mostly AU anyway.

The history of one Momochi Zabuza as a genin, and what shaped the demon to become what he did.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto or any of the characters affiliated with the show, though Ayako is the creation of myself and Kirishtu. Yeah, I love owning her soul.

* * *

She had been feared. 

And rightly so.

In these newer generations, the people of the countries had gone soft. Warriors, once proud and stained in blood, now watched-- old and decrepit-- as the killing instinct waned, some going years and years into their careers as shinobi before they felt another's pulse stop by their hand, where their predecessors had known death's rattle as well as their own.

It was in those bloody times that she grew, rising from the body of a small girl and transforming into a vicious killer.

Ayako had been a killer.

Her graduation had been marked in gore, cutting through her opponent as easily as one carves their portion of chicken. No one had expected that. Almost as a rule, the population of kunoichi thinned considerably during graduation whenever some unlucky girl found herself pitted against a male shinobi.

It wasn't really an insult, it was a fact. Training regimens were different for the sexes, extra strength training tugged out of the girls' grasps in favor of learning the subtler arts-- seduction, disguise, espionage.

But that never excused them from graduation. Ayako knew this, she had heard the stories as much as any genin, but the fact was really driven home when her elder sister pulled her aside one day, looking frightened.

This itself was cause to worry, because the elder woman had never shown a chink in her armor in all her life, even to her family. Almost feverishly, she asked how hard the younger had been training. At the answer, her white face went even paler, dark eyes widening imploringly, begging the girl to work harder.

"Sleep three hours a night and train through meals if you have to, just make sure you're able to bring any man down by graduation!"

Ayako took this to heart. She went to bed later than anyone she knew, and rose from her sleep in much the same manner. She focused her mind, and turned every moment of rest, any time she wasn't moving, into the equivalent of an hour of sleep. Any other moment was spent in constant motion, honing her body and skills, working through her techniques and tactics whenever she sat down for a lesson in flower-arranging and music.

Finally, the day came when all those months of hard work were put to the test. The students were assembled and paired off, and as many feared, Ayako found herself tilting her head back to consider the menacing size of her opponent.

She knew him, vaguely. He had been the largest in their class, tall and broad and already beginning to ripple with muscle. He was a powerhouse, and fast, too. She knew those watching expected her to die.

They certainly hadn't expected her to whip forward, twisting the boy's wrist until it snapped, hand cracking into the elbow, bone pushing through skin.

She twisted then, almost pressed close enough to touch the boy's side, palms flying out and slamming into his chest, pushing her chakra into him, snapping his sternum in two before dealing a blow to his nose, pushing the bone straight back into his brain.

He was dead before he even hit the floor.

That victory was the starting point. Her life took off then, though some might consider the brutality of it as spiraling out of control. She was given mission after mission, and she rose quickly through the ranks. She was more than a mere kunoichi, she was a force to be reckoned with. More often than not, she was hired for murder rather than to don a kimono and achieve information.

She liked it that way.

It was sick, it was sadistic, she knew. But she never felt more alive than when the adrenaline was racing through her veins, when all her thoughts became focused and clear. She imagined she could even see the bones in her enemy's body as she broke them, eyes fixed morbidly to the point where her sword cleaved flesh in two, clavicle and ribs snapping like twigs under the sheer force that was Kubikiri Houcho.

She never took a student. Even as a jounin of the Bloody Mist, she never thought of herself as a teacher. It wasn't that she didn't like kids, she adored them, spent her quiet moments imagining what it would be like to be called mother-- no, she just felt her personality, her purpose in this world never fit the profile for those blessed few to be called "sensei."

At least until that boy came to be.

She first saw the child in the Academy, on a simple errand, bowing her head to the other woman at the front of the classroom, stepping in to deliver a message, dark orbs scanning the throng of students and filing their faces away.

She knew most of them would soon be dead, but she felt their sacrifice to be lessened if they were remembered in their most vibrant years.

That was when she saw him, a scrawny little thing in the back of the classroom, and for a moment she was absolutely fixated.

He was staring right back at her, but not as the other children were. It was like she was being considered, judged.

Much the same way that she looked at people when first meeting them.

After that incident, her life continued as normal, going out on missions with varying squads, most of the time those being her fellow swordsmen as they stormed strongholds, leaving a trail of viscera and the constant bloody mist in their wake.

But then, all that changed. She found herself standing on the balcony, looking down at the scene she remembered so vividly from her youth, at the children poised to tear each other apart, some dying in an instant and others after working themselves to exhaustion.

She knew something was wrong before it even happened, a slight change in body language and the destruction of the pattern of bodies. Something, something much too small to belong there and not be dead, was pushing through the fighting pairs, leaving that familiar arterial spray in its wake.

She focused in on the disturbance, and her eyes widened. The boy, that same boy from the academy not a month ago, was tearing through the graduating students, kunai in hand and tearing flesh apart.

More than 100 students were dead before he stopped, panting hard to get all the oxygen he could to those little limbs of his, dropping down to the sticky floor and drawing his knees up to his chest, waiting. Ayako held her breath, managing to see, even from her distance, those pale hazel orbs turn upwards, gold framed by maddening white as he considered her.

It was after that day that the famed Ayako, the Beast Hidden in Mist, took her first and only student.

Their introduction was awkward at best, the swordswoman already feeling awkward at being among who she knew to be veteran sensei. They had done this before, taken on genin and trained them, they knew precisely what they were doing.

Somehow, in her heart of hearts, she knew this would end in disaster, as she moved past the students clamoring to be the progeny of this fabled warrioress, instead approaching that lonely little boy in the back and working her features into a smile.

He didn't smile back, those eyes narrowing up at her, suspicious, always suspicious. Their relationship was set in stone after that, the woman driving the boy to the breaking point, tapping into that distrust and strengthening it, punishing the boy viciously when he lowered his guard, even for a moment.

It was foolish, to drive someone so young into that kind of a mentality, not when limits were left unestablished.

She had taken the fact that she had a family for granted, never knowing how their kindness and love had molded her, had made her understand that there was more than just killing in this game of life, even for those who made a living out of it. In her failure, she never thought to understand how an orphan boy would learn such a thing as comfort and companionship and affection.

Her tendency to punish such caring between them further drove the concept out of the boy's head.

She had inadvertently given birth to a monster, one that would only know malice as it suckled, murderous intent growing with each passing year.

It was two years after she took Momochi Zabuza under her wing that she finally realized her mistake.

The incident was almost ludicrous in its ability to be avoided, had she just included those soft little things in his training. For a moment, she wondered if taking him out for a meal occasionally would have led them down a different path.

But only for a moment.

It was a day when the local daimyo had come to visit the village, reinforcing ties with his personal shinobi army and those associated with them. He had even brought his little daughter along.

She was something to be mourned, small and sweet, with large eyes of the deepest brown and filled to the brim with kindness. Her kimono matched her perfectly in its loveliness, a shade of pale green that went well with those dark eyes of hers, silken flowers decorating the fabric in the image of spring. Her obi was even lovelier, a gorgeous shade of purple that made you want to stare at the color for hours on end, wondering if God truly was a painter at heart to create something so lovely.

She had stopped in following her father around, just for one foolish moment, having fallen for those hazel eyes in much the same way that Ayako once had. She moved, and the motion was so graceful that for one terrible moment, Ayako's attention was off her dangerous student, a smile curling her lips as a white hand extended a flower to the boy.

With the same swiftness of that token of friendship, metal glinted as a kunai was extended, the boy child slamming the weapon in her abdomen, the kimono stained a deep red with her blood, opening as the kunai was torn upwards, sticking in her breastbone and all her little organs spilling out of that once-lovely kimono.

The entire gathered populace gave a roar of horror, one even slipping from Ayako's throat as she launched herself forward, shoving the boy aside and pulling the kunai from the girl's sternum. There was a flurry of hands all around as they tried to push those organs back inside, tried to save the life of that sweet little girl.

It was no use. The light left those large eyes, and her body grew still.

Ayako was on her feet in an instant, shoving through the crowd and wrapping her bloodied hand around a small wrist, hand cracking hard against the boy's face.

"What have you done, you stupid child!" she roared in that confused face, and before she could stop herself, she knew she was crying.

"It was poisoned."

"What?" She couldn't even believe what she was hearing, looking into those mistrusting eyes and realizing her mistake, the bottom of her stomach dropping out as if she had just been disemboweled as well.

"The flower was poisoned. You told me they could do that."

Everything was a blur then, and she faintly wondered where her hearing went. She knew the crowd was shouting in its rage, the lord screaming for his daughter, the mass of bodies clamoring to spill the little murderer's blood. But she couldn't hear any of it, only a faint ringing sound, and everything outside from that little face in front of her, stained with blood, was out of focus.

"Where's the little bastard! I'll have his head for this!"

Instantly her hearing was back, and she whirled, turning wide eyes on the clamoring crowd, at the daimyo who had his katana unsheathed, lips pulled back in a wet snarl, face stained by furious tears.

"No! No, don't kill him! This is my fault, it's because of my failure that he did this!" She hardly recognized her own voice, it almost seemed as if another woman entirely was begging for this demon's life, so shrill and broken was that voice. Surely, such a weak and emotional thing couldn't have been her.

"Stand aside, Ayako!"

"No! No, punish me! I allowed it to happen, it was my failure as a teacher--"

"You're not a failure, sensei. You're the strongest, you made me the strongest" The voice brought her into another reality entirely, and she looked over her shoulder at the boy behind her, his face painted with confusion as well as blood.

"No, Zabuza, I am." She managed a smile, a real one that held no threat of pain, drawing a kunai from her pouch. Zabuza tensed, he had learned to fear those smiles as much as a display of anger, knowing that those sweet deceptions brought a world of pain if he let them. He expected to be stabbed.

What he didn't expect was for his sensei, his strong and beautiful sensei, to drop to her knees like a weakling, that metal digging into the soft flesh of the woman's belly, piercing into her side and tearing through flesh as she opened herself up, her own innards spilling out as openly as her tears for everyone to see.

"I never taught you what it meant to be strong. And for that, I am deeply sorry." She bowed her head, still smiling serenely, and her eyes still watched the boy even as a sword cleaved her head from her neck, sparing her the pain of her disembowelment, her apology accepted by the ones who were there to watch her die, but never by herself.

Even as she felt herself pass along, plummeting into the dark that was her own guilt and fear, she knew her beloved student would never understand. She knew that the time had come and gone for him to learn, much like when a child first wraps his head around a language, and that the older he gets, the harder it is for him to learn something new.

She had ruined that boy in the worst of ways, and it would take nothing short of a miracle to piece him back together again.

Ayako had been feared, and rightly so. She had taken lives, had deceived, lied, and murdered. She had even developed a taste for it, acquired the reputation for being as sadistic as she was lovely.

She had never regretted any action in her life.

Until now. The destruction of that one boy's heart had hurt her own far more than the murder of children younger than he. Because unlike them, whose deaths had been marked in victory, Zabuza had been marked by failure, and her heart ached to have failed the one person she had deigned to bring close to her.

So her personal punishment took hold, intestines becoming the roots of a dead tree, her blood the sap and her bones the branches.

There she rested in the pits of hell, the guardian for the forest pestered by cruel birds with human heads, eyes ever fixed on her precious student up until his death in the Land of Waves. She fell silent then, her tears seeping from the bark around her, the tree weeping tears of blood in mourning, branches shaking and harpies taking flight, cawing their agitation at being disturbed from their meal of her leaves.

Until, footsteps approached, tired and heavy. She heard the harpies cry out in rage, and the resulting sounds of claws digging into flesh. She opened her eyes, pushing through the bark and emerging from her tree to face this trespasser, lips drawn back in a snarl to drive this man away before the birds completely tore this wandering soul apart.

She waved her hands, and the attacking birds evaporated to black smoke, curling amongst the leaves of the trees and reforming, watching with murder in their eyes. The one before her raised himself up, the dull cloth of his sleeve pressed to his face, and the two bright red lines that the harpies had inflicted on his face, cutting across soft lips and ranging from his chin to cheekbone.

She blinked, then smiled at the man before her, head lowering in a display of reverence.

"So blessed, the angel that loved him… Welcome to the Wood of the Suicides, Haku-san."


End file.
